“The Stars Were Aligned”

Sometimes inspiration strikes in unusual ways at unusual times. I was tagged in a quote tweet where Prof Peter Coles states that as an astrophysicist he must contest Prince Harry’s statement that “the stars were aligned when he met Meghan.”

Now, I’m currently on my honeymoon in New Zealand and we are waiting at the Rotorua airport for a flight to Christchurch. Not exactly the right time or place for doing calculations (husband comments “oh, you’re doing Maths again!”)But the idea of star alignment really tickled me, so if you are curious too, the maximum number of stars that are aligned in the Milky Way is 22!

Obviously, there are a few assumptions. I used the generic alignments of random points on a plane approach, stars are distributed randomly (which is not true) and also they are all the size of the Sun.